Shoot the Piano Player!

Honestly, Shoot the Piano Player makes me think a lot about one thing: where will I be when I wash up? This concert pianist now plays in a pathetic small bar in Parisian anonymity where un-self-conscious folk go to dance among whores and sailors et cetera. It turns out he's there because he can't resist tasting something from his former life but, as we eventually learn, the whole gig is a dish of self-pity served cold. This film is fundamentally comic (the thugs are incompetent, Fido the kid apes adults with a physical comedy embrionically redolent of The 400 Blows, and the faux femme fatale perishes with comically bad splicing and poor pacing/editing). And yet there's something horribly appealing about Charlie's sober psychology, his calculated ability to desert women at the crucial juncture of intimacy, and his hilarious capacity to survive thoroughly unlikely confrontations. So it's hard not to consider how much we all resemble Charlie, our fantasies of unbounded success hindered by other people's interests and our real-world failures.

Shoot the Piano Player - Criterion Collection